Dear friends, welcome to the channel Eastern Front! Today we will talk about women at
war. They need to be talked about, they cannot be erased from memory, this truth
should not be turned away. We will talk, but not in order to gloat,
they say, "here, the Communists did not protect their women," but in order to remember.
To remember that they were… What could be worse than being a Soviet prisoner of war who fell
into the harsh hands of the Wehrmacht? It's worse if you're also a woman…
Someone's mothers, wives, sisters. They did not deserve such a fate, they were not born
in order to, at best, rearrange tired legs on the parade ground of the German Ravensbruck.
A woman in the army and a woman at war are already stressful,
and then there is also captivity. Therefore, quite often they left the last cartridge for themselves,
just not to get there, just to avoid this fate.
In the summer of 1941. It was the first time the Wehrmacht had encountered so many women
in uniform on the side of the enemy. They didn't know what to do with them,
they didn't consider Soviet prisoners of war to be conventions at all, and then there were women.
They did it in different ways, often "decided on the spot", in August 1941,
in the 4th field army, Kluge even gave an order - "women in military uniforms
should not be taken prisoner", but they quickly came to their senses and canceled,
apparently then it was too much for them. Later, in the conditions of total war,
the Germans will forget about any humanism towards female servicemen and from February
1944 they will begin to send them in concentration camps (although many will get there much earlier).
In the first - the most difficult months of the war, women were in the general flow of
prisoners of war and got into the assembly camps, and then who would be "lucky". They
could have been sent to Germany for work, or they could have been sent to the Stalag,
where the Germans specifically kept female prisoners of war in separate women's barracks.
They could not get to the stalag (the way to them was not close,
through marshaling yards and points), becoming a "toy" in the hands of policemen,
collaborators or convoy Germans along the way.
In the Ravensbruck camp, women did hard work every day, women of all European nationalities were
gathered in the camp, but even there Russian girls stood out for their character and inner core.
The former prisoner Germaine Tilon in her memoirs gave a characteristic to
the Russian women prisoners of war who got into Ravensbruck: "... their cohesion was
explained by the fact that they had gone through army school even before capture.
They were young, strong, neat and honest. There were also intelligentsia among them (doctors,
teachers) — friendly and attentive. In addition, we liked their insubordination, unwillingness to
obey the Germans." The Ravensbruck concentration camp was liberated by Soviet troops on April 1945.
From the first days of the war, tens of thousands of female medical workers and signalers
were mobilized in the Red Army, the most massive conscription began later.
On the basis of the resolutions of the State Defense Committee
of March 25, April 13 and 23, of 1942, mass mobilization began.
They were everywhere, not only pulling out the wounded and serving as medical instructors.
They flew navigators and fighters, fought in reconnaissance, with a sniper rifle.
Many female servicemen were in the besieged Sevastopol in 1942, where they fought to the last,
we also remember the girls of the anti-aircraft gunners at Stalingrad,
who burned German tanks. We remember and know many others.
Probably no one will write more stridently, harshly and truthfully about the female
at the front than Svetlana Alexievich in her book "War has no female face.”
After the war, evil tongues tried to steal the victory from them. By gluing the stamp "PPZH",
and the word “frontovishka” or "front-line female soldier" has become almost a stigma. PPZH
means “field wife” and has a negative accent that it is a girl with low moral principles.
They sincerely could not understand, because they gave all their strength
helping and protecting men at the front, why now, in the rear, there is no one to protect them?
More than 150 thousand Soviet women were awarded military orders and medals. 200 — Orders of
Glory of the 2nd and 3rd degree. 86 women were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Many of them were not destined to reach Berlin, many disappeared into obscurity,
but there were those who did. There were those who took revenge for the sisters who perished
in the German "stalags", front-line forests and nameless craters of that terrible war...
Dear friends, that's all for today. It was Tim
and the Eastern Front channel. And as usual I wish you peace and health. See you.